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Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season
Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season
Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season
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Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season

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Written by experienced climber Nick Heil, Dark Summit is both a riveting account of a notorious climbing season and a troubling investigation into whether the pursuit of the ultimate mountaineering prize has spiraled out of control.

"A dramatic story, ably and convincingly told . . . A chilling look at the precarious line between success and tragedy."—Kirkus Reviews


On May 15, 2006, a young British climber named David Sharp lay dying near the top of Mount Everest while forty other climbers walked past him on their way to the summit. A week later, Lincoln Hall, a seasoned Australian climber, was left for dead near the same spot. Hall's death was reported around the world, but the next day he was found alive after spending the night on the upper mountain with no food and no shelter.

If David Sharp's death was shocking, it was hardly singular: ten others died attempting to reach the summit that year. In this meticulous inquiry into what went wrong, Nick Heil tells the full story of the deadliest year on Everest since the infamous season of 1996. As more climbers attempt the summit each year, Heil shows how increasingly risky expeditions and unscrupulous outfitters threaten to turn Everest into a deadly circus.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 29, 2008
ISBN9781429937184
Author

Nick Heil

Nick Heil is the author of Dark Summit, and also wrote about the 2006 climbing season for Men’s Journal. Now a freelance journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was a senior editor at Outside from 1999 to 2006. He has also worked as a climbing and skiing instructor, and has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and North America.

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Rating: 3.8823530509803925 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyable read about the 2006 season on the north side of Mt. Everest -- when 40 climbers climbed past David Sharp, who was dying, on the way to the summit. A few weeks laster, a massive rescue effort helped Lincoln Hall escape a similar fate. I found the book to be pretty well balanced and interesting.... but without any real resolution on whether Sharp could have been revived and saved with a more concerted rescue effort. Well worth reading if you enjoy mountaineering tales.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Why do I like reading Mt. Everest books? I don't know, but I do, and this is a good one. I particularly enjoyed the extensive background on the history of attempts on the mountain, which gave great perspective to the disastrous 2006 season. Well done.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I do hike and climb, even do some mountaineering, with some 3500+ peaks in the Alps, so far far away from what Himalayas mean. Doing this kind of stuff myself, at a totally different level I understand what to summit fever can be and what drives people to the high mountains. I bought the book in an airport and a 4 hours flight passed unbelievably short. I was hooked. I still didn't finish the book, but reading it while watching Discovery Channel's "Everest - Beyond the Limit" series (S01 being about the same Himex expedition described in Nick Heil's book) really helps you understand what's there. I like not only the description of the 2006 events, but also the additional information (like the high altitude sickness, the info about Malory and Irvine expedition in 1924, the brief history of Everest climbing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Having read many books on Everest, K2 and mountaineering in general, i found this a truly enjoyable read...Heil is a master storyteller and this book is a must read if you enjoyed Into Thin Air, which chronicled the 1996 disaster in the same mountain.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not a bad book, but not a great one. The book felt choppy as the author jumped from one subject and one climber to another. It does do a service in balancing much of the reporting about the death of David Sharp.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There are three kinds of books about climbing expeditions; those written by serious climbers - these are usually not particularly well-written, but are gripping because of their passion and the drama of their lived experience; Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; and books written by non-climbers or amateur climbers who are hoping to write a successful book just like Into Thin Air. Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil falls firmly into that third category. In 2006, a decade after Into Thin Air was written, Everest was even more crowded with more climbers who required greater comfort and more help to reach the summit and return safely. On the north (Tibetan) side of Everest, the biggest and most luxurious outfitter is run by Russell Brice, who throws the best parties and is the one responsible for stringing the lines that allow all those climbers to reach the summit. Heil is fascinated by Brice and most of the book is told from the points of view of members of his team of guides and climbers. That season saw several deaths, but the controversy referred to in the subtitle is the death of one man and the survival of another. David Sharp was climbing alone, using a climbing outfit solely as a way of getting access to the mountain. He climbed without sherpas and without anyone knowing his plans. He ended up stranded above a tricky bit of climbing (the Second Step) and while he was noticed by several climbers and passed by at least forty, no one helped him in any substantial way, despite his obvious peril. Another climber, who had been left for dead, was found by climbers heading up to the summit early the next day. He was rescued, in an effort that involved several teams. Afterwards, questions were raised about why one man was rescued and the other abandoned. These are not unfamiliar issues and while the question of who gets rescued and who is not, and when is abandoning an attempt to reach the summit the right decision and when is the summit (given the time and money required to even make the attempt) more important than another adventurer's life. Ultimately, Heil's book is a disappointment. While his account of what happened over those few days is gripping, he fudges the serious questions he raises and is far too infatuated with Brice and his impressive business to pay serious attention to the issues of the ethical considerations of climbing a mountain that is a capitalist free-for-all, with the wealthiest climbers being able to purchase the certainty of a rescue being attempted if they run into problems, as well as the many unprepared climbers seeking to be the first of a category to summit (in this season, the first double amputee and the youngest teenager, for example) or simply gain the bragging rights, without the needed experience on other difficult peaks.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dark Summit does for 2006 and the Tibetan side of Everest what Into Thin Air did for 1996 and the Nepalese side.  Both years were calamitous on the mountain and figure as the most deadly in Everest's history. Dark Summit deserves a much larger audience than it has found: it is readable, well researched, fair, and fascinating.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everest - the highest mountain in the world and the ultimate climbing challenge. In 2006, 11 people died attempting to reach the summit, the most fatalities since 1996. But unlike 1996, 2006 saw no surprise blizzard, only the constant dangers posed by unstable ice, merciless cold, thin air - and human nature.
    Nick Heil tells the shocking true stories of David Sharp, a young British solo climber, who was passed by 40 mountaineers as he lay dying on the slopes of the mountain, and Lincoln Hall who was left for dead yet miraculously survived, and asks: what does climbing the world's highest peak really mean for those who take on the challenge? And how far will they go in their single-minded pursuit of the ultimate mountaineering prize?
    This book opens the door into the darkest recesses of the human mind and shows the extraordinary determination, mental strength and overriding will to survive that we as humans are capable of.


    Every year climbers from all over the world are drawn to Mount Everest in an attempt to reach the summit. There have been many tragedies on Everest but none created as much controversy and soul searching amongst the climbing community as that of British climber David Sharp during the 2006 climbing season during which 11 people died making it the second deadliest season on record.

    Author Nick Heil draws a detailed account of the events of 2006 that took place during that fateful season, including David Sharp’s death, the astonishing story of Lincoln Hall and looks the at the ethical questions being asked as increasing numbers of people who shouldn’t be within a 1000 miles of Everest are allowed to climb…for a fee.

    Nick Heil doesn’t point the finger at anyone or any or organisation but allows the reader to come to their own conclusions regarding the “hobby climbers” who should never have been allowed on the mountain in the first place.

    Thought provoking,insightful and heartbreaking…


  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In 2006, Mount Everest saw it's deadliest season since 1996 (the year Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air). But this time around, weather was not the cause. One man died after being passed by numerous climbers while he was still alive; another was left behind when they thought he was a lost cause (he was “left for dead”, similar to Beck Weathers in 1996); miraculously, he lived. Another really good mountaineering book. The beginning, while looking back at history and – at the same time – introducing us to the “players” in 2006, I had a bit of hard time following, with so many people, years, stories. But, once we got going and focused on 2006, the story was riveting. I don't remember crying while reading Into Thin Air (but I'd be surprised if I didn't; I likely just don't remember), but I cried at a couple of places reading this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nick Heil has worked hard to try and write a balanced account of the events during Everest's 2006 season and to try and explain just why so many experienced and inexperienced climbers make the attempt to climb to the top of the world. This is not a romanticised account and, unlike so many, Heil does not point fingers or try and sensationalise events. Heil effectively conveys just how hard life it is to rescue anyone at altitude where everyone's brain is oxygen deprived and perception is at best foggy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Every year mountaineers from around the world are drawn to the base of Everest - whose peak reaches 29,035 feet into the sky - to attempt to reach the summit. Many have died climbing Everest, but perhaps no single death had created more controversy than the death of British climber David Sharp during the 2006 climbing season. In all, the 2006 season resulted in 11 deaths – the second deadliest season on record. In Dark Summit, author Nick Heil creates a detailed account of the events of 2006 that took place on the north side of Everest, including David Sharp’s death, the miraculous rescue of Lincoln Hall and the ethical questions being raised as more and more people with less and less experience attempt to climb the highest peak on earth. Nick Heil is an experienced climber, but he was not on Everest in 2006. Rather than handicapping him as an outsider, it actually enhances his credibility because, unlike Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, Nick doesn’t have any loyalties to the people involved nor is he trying to paint himself as a hero. Instead, the book creates a comprehensive review detailing exactly what happened on the mountain and allows the reader to make their own decisions about what to think about the industry that has formed on the side of Everest. Aside from being well researched, it is also a very compelling read, told with a story telling knack that any reader should appreciate. I highly recommend the book for anyone who has ever wondered what goes on at the top of the world.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this book - I'm not into mountain climbing or Everest and really don't know much of anything about it other than it is a thing that people sometimes do. Yet this book was fascinating and I devoured it. The writing style was very engaging and managed to not be dry at all, even with all the history and backstory included. The timeline wasn't completely straightforward and there were a LOT of people introduced so it was a bit difficult to keep everyone straight (which was really the only drawback to this book) but the pacing and style made it very easy to keep going. Perhaps someone that has more of a background in mountaineering books might feel that the first chapters spend too much time on the history of summiting on Everest but it I appreciated it. I did have to look up a number of mountaineering words (that I'm sure I will forget rapidly). Really fascinating.

Book preview

Dark Summit - Nick Heil

Partial List of Teams and Climbers on Everest’s North Side, 2006

7 Summits

Alex Abramov

Kevin Augello

Michael Dillon

Lincoln Hall

Christopher Harris

Richard Harris

Harry Kikstra

Sergei Kofanov

Ludmila Korobeshko

Vladimir Lande

David Lien

Ronnie Muhl

Igor Plyushkin

Andrey Selivanov

Slate Stern

Thomas Weber

Kirk Wheatley

Mingma Sherpa

Pasang Sherpa

Pemba Sherpa

Lakcha Sherpa

Dawa Tenzing Sherpa

Dorje Sherpa

Project Himalaya

Laurie Bagley

Duncan Chessell

Chris Klinke

Jamie McGuinness

Anne Parmenter

Hans Fredrick Strang

Scott Woolums

Chhiri Sherpa

SummitClimb

Andrew Brash

Phil Crampton

Dan Mazur

Juan Pablo Milana

Myles Osborne

Jangbu Sherpa

Asian Trekking Permit

George Dijmarescu

Lakpha Sherpani

Dave Watson

David Sharp (climbing independently)

Himex

Wayne Cowboy Alexander

Marcel Bach

Gerard Bourrat

Russell Brice

Max Chaya

Bill Crouse

Kurt Hefti

Shaun Hutson

Mark Inglis

Mogens Jensen

Bob Killip

Tim Medvetz

Brett Merrell

Terry O’Connor

Ken Sauls

Mark Whetu

Mark Woody Woodward

Tuk Bahadur Sherpa

Lhakpa Sherpa

Dorje Sherpa

Phurba Tashi Sherpa

Tashi Phinjo Sherpa

Sonam Sherpa

DARK

SUMMIT

PROLOGUE

Late on the night of May 10, 1996, a twenty-eight-year-old Ladakhi named Tsewang Paljor struggled slowly down Everest’s Northeast Ridge. The two teammates he’d been climbing with, Dorje Morup and Tsewang Smanla, were somewhere behind him, perhaps dead; he had not seen them for hours. Not that he could have helped them anyway. The storm bore down on the mountain with a primordial intensity unlike anything Paljor had ever experienced. The temperature plunged to minus 50, cold enough to freeze exposed flesh straight through in minutes. Gusts approaching eighty miles per hour ripped across the high escarpments, threatening to fling Paljor off the ridge like a bit of straw. Visibility was nil. His world extended just a few feet in front of him, snow swirling madly through the fading yellow beam of his headlamp. Paljor had run out of oxygen hours earlier, and now, fighting to complete each ataxic step, battered by dehydration and fatigue, his only chance was to make it to high camp, still a thousand feet below, where others would be waiting with extra gas and hot tea. If he remained here, above 28,000 feet, in such desperate conditions, he was doomed.

Paljor belonged to a proud expedition, some forty men strong, led by Mohinder Singh, a commander for the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and one of India’s most accomplished mountaineers. Singh was vying to put the first Indian on the summit of Everest via the legendary Northeast Ridge—the route where Mallory and Irvine had vanished in 1924, a line of ascent that would thwart attempts for another thirty-six years. The Chinese had been the first to complete the ridge, in 1960, and many teams and individuals had ascended the route since, but it would hardly diminish the accomplishment pending for Singh and his climbers. Theirs had been an auspicious enterprise, almost entirely without setbacks during the two months they had been on Everest. Finally, at around six P.M. on May 10, Singh’s radio had crackled to life: Smanla, Paljor, and Morup reported that they were standing on the summit.

The tempest was approaching its crescendo, but Singh and the others gathered at Advanced Base Camp erupted into cheers. This is a magnificent achievement, for our expedition and for our country!, Singh shouted into the handset, the wind roaring, bowing the tent walls. Now, he urged, the climbers must hurry down without delay.

The next morning, Singh received word from high camp, at 27,300 feet, that the trio had not returned. This was devastating news, with an added complication since he had already phoned the Indian prime minister, Narasimha Rao, to inform him of their success; telling Rao that the three men were now lost was not a task Singh relished. But he didn’t give up hope. Although there had been no contact since the evening before, it was possible his men had been able to ride out the night.

That day, increasingly desperate to act, Singh approached a cluster of neighboring tents in Advanced Base Camp occupied by a Japanese expedition. The weather had still not relented, but word was circulating that two Japanese climbers, Hiroshi Hanada and Eisuke Shigekawa, and three Sherpas were in position at high camp and planning to depart for a summit attempt that night. Singh’s own climbers were of no use. Those back in their tents were exhausted from their aborted efforts on the ridge, and it would take at least two days for anyone from Advanced Base Camp to reach the stranded men. Singh had no option but to implore the Japanese expedition leader, Koji Yada, to assist him; if his men were still alive they most certainly wouldn’t be after a second night, and the Japanese summit team—relatively fresh, strong, and well supplied—might be their last chance. The conversation took place in three languages, English, Japanese, and Hindi, but Singh came away believing that the Japanese would do their best to provide whatever assistance they could.

The ensuing twenty-four hours were fraught with confusion. Communication on Everest was problematic even in the best conditions, and the storm had reduced radio contact to the most basic and sporadic dialogue. What few reports filtered down the mountain convinced Singh that a rescue was under way, yet he also learned that the Japanese had pushed on to the summit. How could this be? By 5:30 P.M. on May 12, as the last of the Japanese summit group pulled back into high camp, it became clear that none of the Indians were with them. There had been no rescue.

When the Japanese descended to Advanced Base Camp the following afternoon, the news was grim. They had, in fact, encountered Singh’s men, and while their lead Sherpa had helped free one of them, probably Smanla, snared in a tangle of fixed lines on the Second Step, little else could be done, they insisted. They were Indian climbers—we didn’t know them, Hanada told Richard Cowper, a journalist for the Financial Times in London who was accompanying a British expedition on Everest that year. No, we didn’t give them any water. We didn’t talk to them. They had severe high-altitude sickness. They looked as though they were dangerous.

We climb by ourselves, by our own efforts, on the big mountains, Shigekawa added. We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.

Singh was apoplectic. How could a strong team of five have passed his men and done nothing? When had the summit become more important than another man’s life? There was still more bad news. Hanada and Shigekawa said that there had been no evidence of the Indians on the summit—no footprints, no prayer flags, no empty oxygen canisters. They speculated that in the poor weather and dwindling light of May 10 the Indians had mistakenly pulled up short, some one hundred vertical feet below Everest’s apex.

On May 13, Singh, still fuming, convened a meeting of expedition leaders at Advanced Base Camp, urging them to endorse a statement condemning the Japanese for neglecting his men. This was an outrage and a disgrace—tantamount to murder, Singh said. But the other team leaders, while sympathetic, weren’t so quick to take sides. It was a seasoned group, including veteran British climber Simon Lowe and Slovenian Viktor Groselg, and they understood the extenuating circumstances at altitude—the stark Darwinian reality climbers confronted above 8,000 meters. Several people at the meeting cited previous examples of individuals who had been left for dead on the mountain. They pointed out that Singh’s six-man summit party had left high camp at eight A.M. on May 10, dangerously late by any standard. What’s more, Smanla, Paljor, and Morup had continued to push upward in abysmal conditions despite protests from their three climbing partners, who had turned back midway up the ridge.

Even though he had garnered little support from the other team leaders, Singh released his accusatory statement to the press. If the Japanese believed there was no morality above 8,000 meters, then the world was going to know about it.

Singh’s plight might have drawn more attention had other dire events not been taking place simultaneously on the opposite side of the mountain. By the time the May 10 storm had cleared out, five more people had died, including commercial clients Yasuko Namba and Doug Hansen, veteran guide Andy Harris, and two expedition leaders, Scott Fischer and Rob Hall. It was a disaster of such magnitude that it would eclipse everything else happening on Everest for months, even years.

Before long a small library of firsthand accounts emerged, most notably Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb, Beck Weathers’s Left for Dead, Kenneth Kamler’s Doctor on Everest, and Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest. The mountain hadn’t seen such publicity since it had first been scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, but the new light shining down on the world’s highest peak illuminated a very different place. Gone were the tweedy gentlemen climbers of yesteryear pioneering their way across a virgin landscape; this modern, commercialized Everest was overcrowded and largely unregulated, a high-altitude playground where conga lines of novice clients clogged the route, where deep-pocketed dilettantes of dubious ability were short-roped to well-compensated Sherpas and guides.

Mountaineering had long championed a keen sense of ethics and style, and this contemporary tableau represented the worst of all scenarios. Veteran climbers sniffed that Everest had become a slag heap, as Krakauer wrote in Into Thin Air, athletically and aesthetically unworthy, debased and profaned by the sheer number of amateurs flocking there, relying on regressive siege tactics, defiling the campsites and trailsides with their waste. And filth wasn’t the only problem. As more people showed up at Everest each season, the most serious hazards were less objective—rockfall, avalanche, weather, the vagaries of altitude—than subjective: misguided decision making, personal agendas, professional rivalries. The communal nature of climbing—the so-called fellowship of the rope—was frayed nearly to the snapping point. By the end of the 1996 season, the public perception of Everest had been altered for good. What had once stood as a symbol of what was best in mankind—determination, tenacity, teamwork—now represented something much darker: ego, hubris, greed.

After 1996, it was clear that the business of Everest had become deadly folly; given the enormously high stakes, it was amazing that anyone continued to show up at all. But show up they did. At first with some trepidation—the number of climbers on Everest dropped slightly in 1997 compared with the year before—but over the next few years business began to resurge dramatically. Despite the fact that Nepal, the port of entry for most climbers regardless of their intended route, was convulsing with civil war, effectively cutting tourism by as much as half, the number of Everest permits issued by the Nepal Mountaineering Association soon reached an all-time high. Between 2000 and 2005, more people climbed to the top of the world than had summited during the previous fifty years.

When I traveled to the Everest region in the spring of 2005, en route to a neighboring 21,000-foot peak called Cholatse, more than four hundred people had already descended on Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Another four hundred were stationed on the north side, in Tibet. My expedition was composed of big-mountain veterans, many of them sponsored athletes, including Pete Athans, who had made a total of fifteen trips to Everest and summited seven times. Another team member, filmmaker Michael Brown, had summited three times. Five others had each summited once: Conrad Anker, who had discovered George Mallory’s body in 1999; Geoff Tabin, an American ophthalmologist; Brown’s business partner David D’Angelo; and two Sherpas—Dawa and Ang Temba. The climbers claimed a grand total of fifteen Everest summits among them. Naturally, we were all interested in the activity taking place on Everest that year, and we entertained ourselves by monitoring radio traffic on the mountain from our own Base Camp, just twelve miles away.

Despite the cumulative experience of the climbers on my trip, no one could venture a concise explanation for Everest’s ever-expanding allure. If anything, this particular group seemed more puzzled and cynical about the mountain’s rapidly burgeoning popularity, perhaps because of the seriousness with which they approached climbing but also because they shared an acute awareness of the sustained misery, hard labor, and unnerving risk of high-altitude mountaineering—its propensity to freeze digits and delete brain cells by the millions, the way it could snuff out the lives of friends, acquaintances, and teammates with cold, capricious indifference.

That spring, during a brief side trip from the Cholatse expedition, I caught my first glimpse of Everest from a lofty knob called Gokyo Ri, a favorite trekking destination at the head of the Gokyo Valley. As is true for many scenic wonders, pictures hardly do Everest justice. I’d hiked up in the early-morning dark with half a dozen people I didn’t know, switchbacking up a trail through thick fog. We emerged from the cloud layer a little before dawn as if breaching a sea, just a few hundred feet from the top, our viewpoint the smallest island floating among an archipelago of 7,000-and 8,000-meter peaks—Makalu, Cho Oyu, Lhotse, Nuptse. Above them all: Everest, a soaring black dorsal fin etched against the gloaming.

It was astonishing to me that anyone could climb that high; even where I stood at 18,000 feet, a relatively modest elevation by Himalayan standards, I was loopy with altitude, my temples thudding from the steep trail. I’d already spent a grueling night at a similar elevation wedged into a two-man tent halfway up Cholatse, catatonic in my sleeping bag, cymbals crashing inside my skull, waves of nausea welling up in my throat as the night stretched on interminably. The few times I dozed, the sleep was fitful, wracked by vivid and bizarre dreams, like one in which my dog, a perfectly sweet and healthy rottweiler mix in real life, had somehow acquired a peg leg and stainless-steel fangs and turned on me, drooling, ready to pounce. I descended the next day and quickly recovered, but that experience was as unpleasant as any I’d ever had in the mountains. The notion of ascending another 11,000 vertical feet into darker nightmares and more prolonged suffering was inconceivable in a way that no amount of goose down, fixed ropes, or bottled oxygen could alter.

By 2005, at age thirty-eight, I had acquired a moderate amount of climbing experience, mostly on glaciated North American peaks like Mount Rainier and assorted rock crags around the West, where I’d lived since my twenties. I had done just enough mountaineering to develop a dabbler’s appreciation for it, in the same way, I suppose, that receiving your driver’s license gives you an inkling of Formula One racing—the fundamental activity was similar but the intensity differed by considerable degrees. Cholatse provided my first exposure to Himalayan climbing, and I began to understand just how formidable it could be. On our trip, five of my team members managed to summit, but it required a strenuous twenty-hour push from the highest camp. One of those who made it, Abby Watkins, a professional climber from Golden, British Columbia, and as capable and fit a mountain athlete as I’ve ever met, told me later how someone at high camp had handed her a cup of hot tea as she’d collapsed in her tent on the way back down. She woke up the next morning wearing her boots and parka, a full cup of tea in her hand—frozen solid.

Few experiences rival a serious climb for bringing us into close contact with our own limitations. Part engineering project, part chess game, part ultramarathon, mountaineering demands of us in a way that other endeavors do not. After my trip to Cholatse, I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art or even, in its purest form, rugged spirituality—a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to become what we are capable of becoming. This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak—Rainier, Cholatse, Everest—the more it fires the imagination.

In 2006, as the spring Everest season was winding down, I was asked to write a brief story about some breaking news just emerging from the mountain. Several deaths had occurred near the summit during the preceding weeks, but one in particular had sparked renewed outrage and righteous indignation. According to various reports, forty climbers had walked past a dying man on their way to the top. In the crosshairs of controversy was the mayor of the north side, New Zealander Russell Brice, Everest’s most successful commercial operator. Brice’s team was among those who had written off the dying man alongside the route. What might have been done to help him, and why more hadn’t been, became the focus of wild speculation, but it also served to confirm the hushed predictions that had been percolating for years: Everest’s problems were still on the rise, and another disaster was overdue. By the end of the season, eleven people had died (and another should have but had miraculously lived)—the second-deadliest year in Everest’s history, and arguably the most controversial: This time there had been no killer storm; this time the weather had been nearly perfect.

We produced our story, which quickly mushroomed to more than four thousand words, in just over a week, in the white heat common to magazine deadlines, but even that barely began to scratch the surface. Soon enough, I found myself immersed in the larger tale, embarking on a journey that would take me around the globe in search of the full account, leading eventually to Everest’s soaring north side and up its flanks, toward a small rock alcove where the destinies of a dozen climbers had braided together and sparked the debate that had resonated around the world. It was here that a young British climber named David Sharp had died, alone, next to the frozen body of another mountaineer who, years before, had also been abandoned to his own fate.

To most who ascended Everest’s Northeast Ridge, the figure next to Sharp in the alcove was known only as Green Boots, a nickname that illustrated mountaineering’s fondness for gallows humor but also reminded climbers of the peril they faced when ascending to such heights. By 2006 only a few individuals could recall Green Boots’ real name: Tsewang Paljor, the Indian who had remained where the Japanese team had last seen him alive ten years earlier, his ordeal long since swept away in the spindrift of the seasons.

PART ONE

DAVID SHARP

The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

—Moby Dick

CHAPTER 1

KATHMANDU

First, the climbers bought bottles of beer in the lobby; then they hiked the five flights of stairs to the hotel’s rooftop terrace, where they faced west to watch the eclipse begin above Kathmandu. It was March 29, 2006, and at five P.M. that day the moon began to drift in front of the sun, casting the buildings in shadow. The blocky contour of the city’s skyline was swept into silhouette, the distant foothills fading to a suggestion. This was the first instance when an eclipse like this had been visible from Nepal at the beginning of an Everest expedition. How could you not take it as a sign?

At the time I was asked if this was a good or bad omen, Russell Brice, the fifty-three-year-old expedition leader, wrote in a press release that summer, after the season had ended, after David Sharp was dead, after the finger-pointing and accusations and incredulity, after he had hand-carried Sharp’s passport to England and returned it to his parents and told them what had happened. My reply was that it was good, but at the time my heart suggested that it was not to be. My inner instincts were to be true.

Astrologers had long held that a solar eclipse portended the overthrow of a ruler or king or, at the very least, that it signified changes to come. Not that Brice was particularly superstitious or inclined to buy the nutty prognostications of pseudoscientists who studied the alignment of stars. But big mountains were unpredictable, human beings even more so. Combine the two and the potential for catastrophe was always right around the corner. During his lifetime of climbing and skiing and ballooning and paragliding and high-altitude skydiving, Brice had known more than a dozen people whose lives had come to a premature end. These friends and acquaintances of his had exploded in their jumpsuits, or fallen into oblivion, or been swept away in a roaring wall of snow and ice, or simply sat down and never got up again. Brice had been lucky. He had not only walked through the valley of death, he’d scrambled up its slopes and ridges and stood on its summit and had never so much as lost a fingertip to frostbite. More important, on his watch as an expedition guide and leader, he had never lost a client—or another guide or a Sherpa, for that matter—though there had certainly been some close calls.

Brice was the founder and owner of Himalayan Experience, better known simply as Himex, one of the largest and most successful outfitters on Everest. He had been running guided expeditions on the mountain since 1994, exclusively on the north side, in Tibet. Over the years, Brice had poured millions into his business, building a small fiefdom that was the envy of many other operators, a source of inspiration and—sometimes—exasperation. The accommodations during a Himex expedition, both on and off the mountain, were some of the best available. He ran a top-notch kitchen, marshaled sophisticated weather data, employed the strongest Sherpas, and hosted raucous parties. During his twelve-year tenure on the hill, Brice had put more than 270 people on the summits of 8,000-meter peaks, more than any other single outfitter.

Brice had twice summited himself, in 1997 and 1998, but now he orchestrated his show perched on the North Col, at 23,000 feet, from which he had an unobstructed view of the Northeast Ridge, the most dangerous part of the route. He tracked his climbers’ progress like a ship captain on the bridge, following them through a telescope peeking out of his tent vestibule, remaining in constant communication via two-way radio or, when that failed, satellite phone. His expeditions were emphatically not a democracy; if he believed a client wasn’t going to make it, he would promptly turn him around. Ignore him and Brice insisted he would "pull the Sherpas off you and deal with it later in

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